About half a year has passed since I last applied to a conference. Now I found a new subject: CSS and what “fancy things” can you do with it so it’s time I found a conference. CSSConf Budapest sounded good at the time.

After thinking for a day or two about what should I talk about, I came up with this:

The frontend dev is a very complex individual – is the link between the logic and the design. Why split this? Are we in such a hurry that we forgot to enjoy our work? In the past 2 years I noticed a trend among developers to focus on the functionality and ignore or use whatever framework for styling – anything but do the CSS themselves. There are even teams where one team member (usually the youngest) is only there to do the styles and maybe some HTML. Or they even ask the designer to do it; or even use tools such as Zeplin to copy/paste whatever styles the designer defined. I do not like the way the frontend is heading. Frontend means what the user sees, in the first place. So why are the developers doing this? Why don’t they write styles anymore? Maybe they find it less important. Because these days is all about being on fast-forward. And styling is anything but fast-forward. I have thought about this the past year and, with my talk I want to show the developers the importance of styling and the importance of not being on fast-forward. CSS is beautiful be it preprocessed or not. And is the means in which you show the world your work. There are a lot of interesting things to do with CSS. There are functions, conditions, loops, expressions, mixins, variables – an entire world of possibilities.

My talk would have reminded and explained the developers how CSS should be written; how many wonderful and (for some) even magic things can be achieved. It is a talk about standards, pre-processing (when it is worth it and when not) and a bit of hack (how can some classic properties be used to display design elements).

I thought maybe to include a section about how we should properly use the front-end frameworks (and I mean USE as opposed to just INCLUDE). All-in-all the talk aimed at young developers that should learn the proper way to work and at experienced developers that are so deep into the logic part of programming the frontend that they don’t remember how beautiful and important proper CSSing is.

Maybe it wasn’t appealing enough (it couldn’t have been money, as I offered to cover my own expenses). Maybe it was too much to talk about both CSS and using framework. I will never know. And while I do understand there is not enough time to send custom feedback to each candidate, I am sure there was time to send a “Your talk did not make it this time” email.
I did not receive any answer. It is true that I understood I was not in when I saw the speakers and I was not one of them, but still; it made me sad.

This is a thing I regret: sending the same talk to multiple conferences. Why? Because I believe is not fair for the conference and the potential attendees. What if I got elected to more that one conference?

It was 2017, sometime in spring, probably March. After conducting a few internal workshops and meetups at my current employer, I finally got the courage to send a proposal to a conference. I thought I knew enough and I had the will to share with others what I know.

The next 10-12 minutes will be about how and why to apply inline styles in React. I will share my ups and downs, and what I learned – like sometimes it really is necessary to put the styles inline.
I am dedicating part of the talk for the style attribute: what is is and how is/should it be used – focusing on the fact that it accepts a JavaScript object rather then a a CSS string; prefixes for different browsers are also included here.

The last past of the talk is about a more modern approach: styled components. I am sharing this part as a JS alternative to inline styling.